Most businesses and other types of organizations rely on a large variety of consumable products such as forms, labels, diskettes, computer paper and computer supplies to collect, store and distribute important information. These organizations can benefit from a comprehensive management system for these information-processing products which can include on-screen form and label design, database management, inventory management, and automated entry of orders and other types of data.
Manufacturers of business information products such as forms and labels generally employ a number of sales representatives located both at the corporate office(s) and offices remotely located therefrom. The sales representatives interact with customers, that is, businesses requiring office supplies such as forms and other products for recording and distributing business-related data, to determine the format and content of a form, label or other product which best suits the customers' data collection and management needs. Following form design, the sales representative generates an order to specify the number of forms be printed, form size, paper quality, ink color, print type, number of plies, requested shipping dates, and fastener type, among other information. Order generation is typically a manual process for the sales representative. Thus, the customer interaction process can be arduous and time-consuming because of the multitude of options that are considered when designing and ordering a form.
After a detailed order is created, a sales representative typically forwards the order electronically or by regular mail to a central corporate office. The order is usually processed at the manufacturer's corporate office to select, from among a number of manufacturing plants co-located with or remotely located from the corporate office, the best equipped plant to fulfill the order. The order is finally forwarded to the selected plant, which manufactures and ships the product in accordance with the specifications in the order. The corporate office generally also performs accounting functions to bill the customer for the manufactured products.
The manner in which an order is generated and processed can vary depending on the business forms manufacturing system. In some systems, the form design and ordering process is done manually by a sales representative, that is, the content of the form and the order are written by the sales representative or customer on paper or electronic forms designed for these processes. The sales representative typically determines the sale price based on data in a pricing manual or available in the memory of a computer. After the representative enters the sell price onto the ordering form, the representative submits the form and the completed order to the manufacturer's order receiving office by facsimile or mail.
Another type of business forms manufacturing system automates the design and ordering of forms by the remotely located customer or sales representative. The system is organized in essentially the same manner described above. It comprises a manufacturer's computer at a central corporate office which communicates with several remote customers' or sales representatives' personal computers (PCs), and computers at the production facilities or plants. The form is designed on a remote PC using a form design software program. The form parameters are automatically transferred to a second software program for ordering, which permits a user to enter additional parameters such as order quantity and delivery information. The PC proceeds to complete the order by automatically calculating price in accordance with the entered parameters and the ordering software. The form and the completed order are subsequently simultaneously transmitted in machine format (i.e., electronically or on disk by mail) to the manufacturer's computer, which confirms the order and determines the best printing facility or plant. The order and form are finally transferred electronically to the selected printing facility.
To compete with other manufacturers of paper and electronic business forms, manufacturers seek to improve their form design and ordering systems and therefore their sales transactions with customers by improving the accuracy of cost and/or list price calculations, and reducing the paperwork and the time spent by sales representatives when performing price estimation and order entry. As explained above, one way manufacturers seek to improve their ordering systems is to automate the ordering process by including automatic price calculations at the sales representative's remote computer. These price estimates, however, are problematic because the sales representatives' computers may not be equipped with the most recent pricing data. Pricing data changes frequently due to a variety of factors such as variable material and labor costs. These changes need to be downloaded regularly to the sales site computers. This can result in inconsistencies in the price estimates calculated by different sales representatives.
For the above reason, among others, predominantly centralized storage of pricing information and consultation between a remote sales site and the manufacturer's corporate office during cost estimation is advantageous. The centralized storage of information also allows for flexibility in pricing to reflect, for example, pricing agreements between certain customers and the manufacturer. Further, the stored pricing data can be continuously updated with data received from different sources, such as manufacturing plants, which can monitor and report actual job and material costs to the manufacturer. Consultation with the corporate office for centralized storage of cost data eliminates the problem of having to continuously update the data at the sales representative's site in order to keep all representatives apprised of the same pricing information.
While it may be possible for the remote computer to access the central database information in order to perform the estimate calculation itself, it is more advantageous for estimate calculation to be performed at the headquarters and then forwarded to the sales site because pricing data and algorithms can be proprietary and, therefore, are best kept for security reasons at a central location for security reasons. Further, centralized storage of price data preserves the integrity of data better than if it were distributed to each of the remote sales computers. Accordingly, a centralized storage system for price data requiring consultation between the different sales representatives and the corporate office system promotes more consistent estimates from the sales representatives.
A disadvantage to calculating price entirely at the sales site, that is, without requiring the exchange of any pricing data with the corporate office during the estimation process, is the lack of corporate office control over the list price offered by the sales representative to the customer. Such control may be desirable for a number of reasons. For example, simple forms such as one-sided, single-ply, carbonless forms can be priced in a relatively straightforward manner at the sales site, provided the material and form feature cost tables consulted by most forms manufacturers for pricing are updated. The equipment set-up time, run speeds and labor required for these types of manufacturing jobs are generally known and factored into the tables. Complicated forms (e.g., multi-ply forms with carbon papers and various perforations and fasteners or hole punching requirements) that are priced using these tables, however, are more likely to be underpriced because slower equipment run speeds, longer set-up times and other factors were not taken into consideration when generating the tables. These other factors can include, for example, the ability of different plants to perform the desired manufacturing processes, and customer and/or manufacturer item-specific contract data. By involving the corporate office in the estimation process, these factors can be taken into account when appropriate. Even when complex forms are not involved, the corporation may simply wish to have corporate office personnel review a sales representative's estimate, for example, because a proposed job exceeds a certain sell price, or involves a new or highly valued customer. Further, previous estimates that are stored at the corporate office can be used for operations and sales administration purposes. For example, previous estimates can be analyzed to locate which potential customers have been approached by a sales representative, to perform analysis such as determining how many estimates mature into product orders, and to determine which sales representatives deserve rewards for their successful endeavors or require additional training and incentives to improve their performance.
Although maintaining pricing data at a central location is advantageous for the reasons given, it generally requires a sales representative to use certain information twice, that is, once in order to get an estimate, and a second time to place an order. The need to re-enter data can be minimized by storing various parameters relating to an item specification, as well as other data relating to the customer, at the sales site and/or the corporate office, and sharing the data between different computers.